Observe and Repeat
by Kalliel
Summary: Inner Sakura visits Sai in his dreams, leading to a midnight visit Sakura is not expecting. The awkwardness of sitting in a room with Sai in the dark is significantly overshadowed by the prospect of sitting in a room with Sai, in the dark, naked. SaiSaku


**Observe and Repeat**  
_Naruto fan fiction_

**Genre:** angst/romance, het  
**Pairing: **Sai/Saku, past!Saku/Sasu**  
Rating: **PG-13 (T), for sexuality**  
Word Count: **1800 or so**  
**

* * *

Sai is taught art in a manner he can understand. The brush is held horizontally, never angled. Pressure when you begin; don't drown the scroll in ink. Never waver--lines, not snakes. If there is an art to artistry, he doesn't know it, nor does he ponder that it even might exist. ANBU is methodic in its instruction and nothing if not efficient. Observe and perform, rinse and repeat, and this is the way to do it.

Sai is not taught dreams (though he is ordered to please ignore them, if he could), and Sai is not taught women, nor sex, because as far as ANBU is concerned, these things either do not exist, or are indistinguishable from the two things that do: agents and missions.

But this is certainly a dream, because even as he drags his brush across the paper, the paper is moving and walking and curiously, curiously warm.

"_Sai_, when I tell you to try to read into the implications of things, I don't mean _dreams_. You have a lot to learn, and you can't get caught up in horoscopes. Leave that for later! You get real things down, and you can spend all the time you want reading tea leaves and keeping a dream diary. More Ino's thing, though." Sakura-in-dreams pulls herself up from the ground, and the still-wet ink trickles down her breast as she folds her legs under her and regards him expectantly. Sai does not ponder the implications of her nakedness.

"Well, it's your dream, isn't it? Either you can't remember what my clothes look like--unlikely--or it's not an implication at all. It's a feeling." Sakura-in-dreams leans sideways towards him and there's a glint in her eye that he's begun to associate with the preemptive signs of willingness to inflict pain, and that he is relatively certain corresponds more specifically with either frustration, or pride, or an odd permutation of both.

Sakura-in-dreams sighs, leans back. "We're working in a world if your own creation, here. If I know more about that world than you do, then we have some serious issues to resolve." She wipes the ink from her breast and torso as best she can. She's employing a sing-songy sort of voice that she uses occasionally on Naruto, when they are all three in Konoha, and don't have anything to do. It's her version of the absent neutrality that blankets the hours without missions (that is, as opposed to the focused neutrality during the hours that _do_ have them), and Sai has yet to determine what, exactly, it is supposed to be.

Sakura-in-dreams rolls onto him, pushes gently on his clavicle until his back presses to the ground completely, and takes the brush from his hands. She seems more large and naked and moonlike when she hovers over him like that.

"Observe and repeat, right?"

--

Sakura narrowly avoids several hours worth of filling out Accidental Damages forms, and Sai narrowly avoids a very gruesome death.

"What the _hell_ are you doing here," Sakura hisses, more out of habit than true need for silence. She's the only one at home--or she would be, if Sai weren't hovering over her futon like--well. Like something that by rights, was asking for a kunai to the throat.

"Observing and repeating," he answers, which doesn't really help much, but it's Sai, so what can she expect? And since it's Sai, she slips the kunai back into the folds of her nightshirt, pulls her blankets around her like a winter shawl, and sighs.

She doesn't ask him to clarify, because it's unlikely that his intentions are ever going to be much clearer than what he's already laid out for her, and because she's too tired to entertain much curiosity in the first place. If she was going to dig around every time Sai said something she didn't understand, she'd never sleep.

"Are you going to go home now?"--which is a pointed suggestion and not really a question at all.

"I don't believe so."

Another sigh. "Okay, then."

She looks out the window--because what else can she do?--and sees the moon, naked and large and bright. It hangs low in the sky, but Sakura can still see it, right through the empty windows of the Uchiha estate. She chose the apartment for that reason. (Though of course when the house was alive and the windows were paneled, she couldn't really see the moon most of the time--just the hazy silhouettes of the people inside the windows inside the house inside the moon.)

She keeps the apartment now because she can't really think of any reason not to.

"Pretty, isn't it?" Sakura says, because sitting in the dark with Sai is awkward enough on its own, and doesn't need the added awkwardness of sitting with _anyone i_n silence.

"I see little point in memorializing abandoned buildings."

"What? No, I wasn't--oh, whatever. Anyway, they're not memorializing anything. They're just not...used any more."

"Because many people died there, and now it's considered a tomb. That is a memorial." Sai explains pointedly.

Sakura frowns. "How...do you know that?"

Because that's what he was taught. "It's a famous story in Root. For what happens when one doubts what should never be doubted."

Admittedly, Sakura's own knowledge of what, exactly, happened is blurred. Once upon a time, it had been her life's goal to delve underneath the underneath of those lonely buildings, but she never did--out of fear, she supposes--and now it just seems too inappropriate, somehow. "A lot of people die?" she replies absently. It seems like something ANBU would teach.

"One person fails to."

And there is Sai being Sai again, so Sakura's not about to press the issue. She doesn't bother looking confused. "Look, Sai. Tsunade sensei has some things lined up for us tomorrow, and that's not going to change if we don't get any sleep. If I don't get any sleep." Because suddenly the idea of Sai ever sleeping is taboo.

Though of course he must.

...Right?

Now this is just getting ridiculous. Of course he did. He is only human. Sai is only human, and so is she, and she is going to sleep, and when she wakes up in the morning, nothing will have changed.

Something inside her rips apart, and she realizes that this is not the first time she's ever thought that about someone. And as it turned out, _every_thing had changed in the morning, and she _hadn't _gotten any sleep, and a select series of events _had_ actually thrown into question the exact degree of humanity that a particular someone possessed.

...And of course, now she was _never_ getting to sleep. "_What_ are you doing here, Sai," Sakura asks again.

Sai peels her blanket from her shoulders, and her nightshirt from her shoulders, and Sakura hiccups in mild surprise. The awkwardness of sitting in a room with Sai in the dark is significantly overshadowed by the prospect of sitting in a room with Sai, in the dark, _naked._

"Allow me to read into your implications tonight."

"My _what_--?"

--

Sakura-in-dreams seemed certain that this would be the absolute best approach, but Sai was beginning to realize that she and Sakura-in-truth were not exactly the same.

"It's okay, though," Sakura-once-in-dreams-and-now-in-mind assures him. "I'm in there.

"Not so much at the forefront of things when strange people end up in my bed in the middle of the night, but I'm in there."

So Sai begins to repeat. He extracts his brush and his inks and he presses the tip to her shoulder, trails down. She squirms under the stroke, and his line turns into a snake. He makes another attempt. He finds that if his brush avoids her breasts, she remains still for him. (Trial and error.) She shudders again when he traces down her inner thigh; his line is a snake again, and its mouth bares its fangs in the spread of ink that her underwear absorbs. What comes afterward is a blank.

One that Sakura fills. "Oh, Sai." She fends off his brush and crawls closer, then untangles it from his grasp completely. "We can't do this. I--you-- I've never done this before. We don't _know_ each other well enough yet, and... Well, you don't just _do_ these things.

"I---I mean. Some people do. But I-- I really don't think we want that between us, right now. Not until we get to know each other a little better."

Sakura is grasping for more words. "A lot better."

He isn't hurt--he doesn't think he is; it's possible he's wrong. This next is simply a statement of fact. "But you don't know Uchiha Sasuke at all."

He picks up his brush.

--

Sakura-in-dreams had pushed him to the ground. She pulled his hands up to her breasts until he cupped them like pools of water, and she had his hands trace down her torso, smearing what was left of the still-undry ink.

Then his hands are the ones peeling off her ink-soaked underwear and her hands are on his penis.

"This is your cock, Sai. I'm not going to think of it like I'm reading out of a med scroll."

She takes his penis-cock and massages small circles all around, with the pads of her thumb and fingers. She smiles somewhat devilishly.

"Observe and repeat." There is much more to learn.

--

Sai closes the window once he excuses himself, I will see you in the morning then, Sakura, but Sakura is shivering all the same. The ink feels like blood all over her, black-shiny in the moonlight, and Sakura can see the designs and she _wishes._

She wishes that there were no moon by which to see. (She _refuses_ to wish that the windows in the next house were paneled, and the shouji blocked the light from her room so that she could see into theirs, like before.)

Because there's a growing hollow in her stomach, and one of Sai's masterpieces snakes everywhere--around her wrists on her legs on her back--and to her, the designs are clear.

Snakes-like-flames drip from that first point on her shoulder--a ring, and a cluster of tomoe in orbit around it. A seal.

A seal she's been trying to forget and perhaps can never forget and _god_, she is so sorry, Sai. She's so sorry. The moon is full and the house next door is empty.

But it hasn't been empty nearly long _enough._

_

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_

_end.  
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End file.
